How to Turn a Wreck Into a Dream Home: Makeover Success 101

They thought their first home was an easy fixer-upper. Six years later, their showpiece is finally done.

Every major remodeling project has a low point. For Jenny Joyce and Rob Crampton, owners of a 1901 fixer-upper in Seattle, it's tough to say just when rock bottom arrived. Maybe it was the time that Jenny's parents flew in to see the work in progress: While Rob was showering, the bathroom wall collapsed, spilling rotten wood and centi­pedes into the tub. Or maybe it was when, after jacking up the house, the couple lived for months without heat or insulation. They would come home at night, seal the drafty front door with duct tape, and huddle around a kerosene heater while wind whipped through the floorboards and the whole house swayed like a boat.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

When Jenny and Rob began their house search, they had no idea how tough the going would get--how they would end up hemorrhaging money and living in preindustrial conditions, buffeted by the weather's wrath. Or how close Jenny would come to throwing up her hands and moving out. Instead, they were excited--a pair of apartment renters claiming their stake in the local real estate boom.

Looking For Fixing Potential

In May 2000, Rob was 32 and had finished his master's degree in environmental engineering. Jenny, 29, was working as a graphic artist. The pair targeted Ballard, a neighborhood 8 miles north of central Seattle that had once housed Scandinavian fishermen, a place where pubs selling beer for a buck were being replaced with nine-dollar-a-glass wine bars. House prices were climbing, a realtor told them. Now was the time to buy. With hardly enough money for a down payment, their only chance was to leverage Jenny's design skills and Rob's construction experience. "We needed something with a lot of fixing potential," Rob says.

More From Popular Mechanics

And that's what they found--a long-neglected, single-story Victorian that had been converted into an illegal duplex rental. The 1850-sq.-ft. house sagged. The floors buckled. Built by a Swede named Swan Hanson a century earlier, it originally had no electricity, insulation or bathrooms. The wiring and plumbing that had later been added were now old and shoddy. But at $225,000, the price was right.

The plan was to buy the house, move in and spend a year or so doing some cosmetic repairs--fixing up bathrooms and the kitchen--and upgrading the mechanicals. Relying on help from friends, the couple would trade lodging for work. But then an inspector discovered that the 6 x 6 fir foundation posts, which rested on stones, were rotten. The bank would provide a loan only if the couple poured a new concrete foundation, a project that would cost at least $25,000. "If we were going to jack up the house, why not go for it?" Jenny says. They decided to add a basement apartment that would some day bring in rental income.

That decision changed everything. Jenny and Rob didn't fully understand the implications, but they were now launching into a major renovation project. Their estimated year of cosmetic work? They spent the entire time making drawings and securing permits. A new plan emerged: Finish the apartment first, move into it and then work on the upstairs. Trouble was, the house had no basement, only a 2-ft.-deep aboveground crawlspace. Adding an apartment below the main floor would mean either raising the house or excavating beneath it. They decided to do both.

House Raising: A simple facelift turned serious when inspectors discovered rotten house-support posts (inset). The solution: Lift the house onto steel I-beams and timber crossties, then pour new concrete footings and a slab floor (top, right).

Lifting and Digging

While they were waiting for the permits to go through, Rob dug four pits in the crawlspace where the house lifter would place his crossties and hydraulic jacks. One day, Rob and a buddy were under the house when everything started to shake. "I thought it was us, because we were digging around the foundation supports," Rob says. Instead, it was the Nisqually earthquake, at magnitude 6.8 one of the largest ever recorded in Washington state. When the tremors stopped, the house was still standing--but the quake made Rob and crew more determined than ever to build a strong foundation. A flatbed semi and a crane showed up, and the crew rolled 60-ft. steel I-beams under the house. When they lifted the structure, "the old forced-air heating system fell off like a big octopus," Rob remembers. The house rested on I-beams and crossties at head height for the next four months while its new owners carried on with life inside.

Once the house was up, an excavation crew removed 40 dumptruck loads of dirt, creating one of the project's single biggest expenses. "We paid an hourly rate for dudes in trucks to sit in traffic for a week," Rob says. The bill: 12 grand. During the excavation, Jenny and Rob had another crisis when a rainstorm filled the hole with water. "It was scary," Rob says, "because water started pooling around the beams holding up the house." Exhausted and mud-coated, he worked for hours pumping out the water.

While the house was jacked up, Rob and his friends poured a new concrete footing around the perimeter, as well as a basement slab and then a stem wall, upon which the house would eventually rest. They replaced rotting floor joists--rough-sawn, old-growth 2 x 8s--with dimensional lumber. The new members had to be shimmed because of the variation in lumber size. They framed out the inside of the basement wall to avoid the look and feel of cold, hard concrete. Rob did everything possible to waterproof the outside of the foundation wall, coating it with Thuroseal, insulating it, installing MiraDrain waterproofing fabric and backfilling with gravel. "A leaky basement is one of those things that marks a house," Rob says. "You end up with mold and smells."

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Fire in the Hole: Interior wall demolition exposed a crumbling chimney in the dining room--evidence of a coal stove that once heated the house. In its place, Jenny set a new gas stove that supplements radiant heat in the floor. She designed a subway-tile surround that Rob installed on a cement backerboard substrate. (Bottom Photograph by Brian Smale)

More From Popular Mechanics

Moving On Down

It was a glorious February day when Jenny and Rob moved from the squalor of the jacked-up house to the new basement apartment. More than three years had passed since they bought the house. "A few more months upstairs, and Jenny wouldn't have lasted. We would have broken up," Rob says, only half joking.

The upstairs remained a war zone, with the walled-in porch opened and demolition well underway. Though the house squared up nicely once it settled onto its new foundation, the plaster walls and ceilings were cracked, buckled and separating from the lath. "You nailed up a picture hanger, and piles of plaster would fall behind the wall," Jenny says. So Rob and his crew took all the walls and ceilings down to the fir studs, hauling away at least 10 tons of plaster, bucket by bucket, and saving the lath for beach bonfires. Now Rob could easily add insulation, wiring and plumbing. He could also nail up interior plywood sheathing before hanging drywall to boost shear strength--another way to prepare for earthquakes.

With the main floor gutted--all the way up to the 12-ft.-high attic peak--Jenny experienced a turning point. "You could stand there and see the entire structure all at once," she says, "and see how beautifully done it was. Everyone would always say, `Why didn't you guys just knock the whole thing over and start again?' It wasn't until that moment that I realized we'd made the right decision."

They installed drywall throughout the house, and then reattached the original trim, most of which had come off without splintering. They scoured architectural salvage shops for replacement doors and hardware. Being environmentally conscious and economical, the couple wanted to make their remodeled home as energy efficient as possible. But they did not want to lose the charm of their old wood-frame, double-sash windows. Instead, they tightened them up by reglazing, caulking and, after deciding to nail the upper sashes shut, insulating the upper sash counterweight channels with 3 in. of polyiso foam.

In the attic, Rob combined the 2 x 6 floor joists with deeper wooden I-beam joists and filled the spaces in between with 68 bales of cellulose insulation. ("You could feel the difference in temperature the next day," Rob says.) The main reason for the new joists, however, was to reinforce the floor. Though the couple didn't have the time, money or energy to finish out the large attic, they realized that someday, if they punched out a couple of dormers, they would have a room with views of Seattle's Space Needle and snowcapped Mount Rainier. So while the house was gutted, they prepped the upstairs and brought plumbing and electrical service to it.

Down to the Studs: The gutted kitchen began its rebirth with a new window (top). Jenny and Rob had a friend build the cabinets from salvaged old-growth fir and a few old bookshelves, then contrasted the warm wood with stainless steel appliances. The counters are PaperStone--a material made of recycled paper and resins. (Bottom Photograph by Gabriella Hasbun)

Home Stretch

Meanwhile, the home's exterior rehabilitation was progressing. Tearing off the house's brick-veneer siding had uncovered the original cedar clapboard, but the new siding for the basement came in different widths and didn't match the original stock. The solution? Rob hammered up a hori­zontal trim board to create a visual breaking point between the basement and main floor. He used old, salvaged siding for repairs above, and new siding below.

Four and a half years into the project, Rob finally overhauled the bathroom, the one with the rotten wall and centipedes, refurbishing the original beaded wainscoting they'd discovered beneath the plaster walls and installing a 1930s sink found at a salvage shop. They turned an adjacent kitchenette (from the illegal duplex) into another bath, with a vanity designed by Jenny and new tile laid by Rob.

The kitchen went from a drab 1940s remodel with cabinets too small for dinner plates to a bright, handsome work space. A friend spent two weeks building cabinets out of the fir joists removed from the attic. Rob and Jenny added stainless steel appliances and a slatelike countertop, made from a synthetic material called PaperStone.

As for the floors, a Seattle friend brought a drum sander and volunteered to give a demonstration. He got so caught up in the work that he did the whole job, grinding through $300 worth of sandpaper along the way. "That's how we survived this project," Jenny says. "We'd burn out, just staring at each other, and then some friend would come through the door psyched to do something."

The work seemed to go on forever. Finally, one January day, nearly six years after Jenny and Rob bought the cottage, a couple asked if they could rent the apartment--by March. Driven by the prospect of money coming in instead of flying out the door, Rob and Jenny rushed to finish a utility room and garage so they could move upstairs. And then, after spending more than $200,000 on the renovation, bringing their total investment to $425,000, they were done. Almost any other buyer would have torn down the century-old cottage and built a cheap apartment building or condos. Now, Jenny and Rob had $1400 per month in rental income and a home that was recently appraised at $785,000.

"We have all kinds of little projects left, but we're in no hurry," says Jenny, who says she feels like a housesitter in someone else's great home. "I hardly want to change a light bulb. I'm still recovering."

House, Reborn: The original 1901 house is now the top floor, with a three-bedroom apartment below. Salvaged Victorian trim, carefully scraped and repainted, and deep cornice and pediment moldings give this 21st century home a touch of period elegance. (Photograph by Brian Smale)